Thursday, September 20, 2012

Spreading a Practice

Holacracy is the most useful organizational practice that I have seen in my over 50 years in organizations.  If you are not familiar with it, head over to holacracy.org and explore the links on the slide show. 

As Holacracy is often on my mind, I have been thinking about how to spread it. This post is a brain dump to get the ideas out of my head to free up space for other things. Many of the ideas here have been action-ed by H1 and others in the community to some extent.  This just allows me to get it out of my head and down on paper at overview level of the landscape.  Each paragraph could be expanded into a much larger discussion, but this is enough for now. Hopefully, this describes a reasonable structure to the issue.

Most of our modern organizations are structured in a hierarchy with most of the power and control at or near the top. Holacracy is a true distributed power and control system.  Thus, to move an organization towards a distributed system like Holacracy, you need to introduce it, either, when the organization is small before it grows and becomes fixed with power and control at the top of a larger structure or introduce it from the top down starting with the current power holders of the organization driving the transition.  These are the two focal points to effectively spread Holacracy, such that implementations happen.  Strictly informational opportunities would not be very helpful unless they influence the two identified focal points.

 With fledgling or small organizations the keys are to identify and educate founders while providing a low enough cost of entry that these organizations can afford to adopt the well documented Holacracy practice instead of the normal an ad-hoc, seat of the pants, keep everything in your head approach most start-ups or small organizations use.

First we need to identify these small organization founders.  If you want to hunt ducks, you go to a duck pond.  For small business, one great place is small business expos.  The cost seems reasonable to setup a booth, handout pamphlets, and engage face to face. Face to face time often has the most effect in infuencing a person and any opportunity to engage a person when they are in the correct frame of mind should be taken.

Keeping the costs in line for the available budget of a small organization has some challenges.  The cost of bringing in a consultant can be beyond the means for many, so this leads to a predominately self help approach.  Sending one person from the organization to the Holacracy Practitioners training can infuse a lot of knowledge to a small group at a reasonable cost.  Joining the Holacracy community of practice opens up more resources and a place to ask questions.  One possibly to consider is creating an identified Holacracy Hotline either manned or voice mail that gets responded to on a daily basis.

Big organizations can be a big challenge.  While the resources can be sufficient for a well supported implementation using consultants, getting the attention of those in power can be very difficult. It is almost impossible to get face to face time with an executive unless you already know them or they are seeking you out. Past history indicates that the most productive entry is through organizational consultants all ready in a relationship with the leaders of an organization.  The key here is to identify and educate organizational consultants and entice them to propagate Holacracy through their organization contacts.

Again where to catch the organizational consultants attention? There are a number of organizational forums and conventions where Holacracy can be presented.  Also, there are a number of periodicals which may accept Holacracy articles.  We also need to think carefully how to entice them to add/change to Holacracy in their offerings. Looking at the problems in the world today, mainstream approaches to leadership and organizational consulting are not working.  The problem is how to get the consultants with years of vested interest in these systems to see, accept and embrace a new way. Most people with a vested interest turn a blind eye to anything contrary to the vested interest.

We also need to explore the various sets of motivations organizations have for adopting Holacracy. 

The traditional areas of efficiency, productivity, profitability are motivators for some leaders.  This is a strength of Holacracy that plays well with managers and leaders once you get their attention.

Emerging is areas of work-life balance, employee engagement, employee satisfaction, employee acquisition and retention.This is being driven from the bottom up, mostly from the younger employees.   More younger workers are using some of these non-monetary attributes as a filter for positions.  Just as the Arab Spring movement towards democracy was driven by the 20 somethings through social media.  The principles that are an advantage of Holacracy needs to be spread to the 20 somethings through social media.  If the kids coming out of college start asking for these things in their job interviews, companies will have to adapt to get the brightest and best employees.  What better motivation can we have to entice the top of an organization to adopt Holacracy.  Over time those that do will out perform those that don't.

No comments:

Post a Comment